I am with Cogar !! I think its a ridiculous waste of money !! I mean,, they sent a car to space,, who is going to use use it ??

As of February 2018, Elon Musk has a net worth of $20.8 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 53rd richest person in the world. So if the man wants to send his Tesla Roadster into orbit around the moon, he can afford to do it! The Tesla Roadster which was produced from 2008-2012, had a base price of $109,000 in the U.S. in 2010. Is that a lot of money to most people...sure it is!

But, people are still trying to track the car with the dummy copilot called “Starman” as they make their way through space. That’s the kind of excitement that stimulates our society today. So as a marketing tool, it was a success for both SpaceX and Tesla. As you know, Musk is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX); co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla

At SpaceX, Musk oversees the development and manufacturing of advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth orbit, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining city on Mars. I know, you are saying Mars? But with science, I have learned one main point…you may be experimenting for one thing and end up learning or inventing something else.

On February 6, 2018, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy, the fourth-highest capacity rocket ever built (after Saturn V, Energia and N1) and the most powerful rocket in operation as of 2018. The inaugural mission carried a Tesla Roadster belonging to Musk as a dummy payload as you already know. But, the company has completed other tasks which may be unknown to you:

At Tesla, Musk oversees all product development, engineering, and design of the company's electric vehicles, battery products, and solar roofs.

Since the company’s inception in 2003, Tesla’s mission has been to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future. The first Tesla product, the Roadster sports car, debuted in 2008, followed by the Model S sedan, which was introduced in 2012, and the Model X SUV, which launched in 2015. Model S was named Motor Trend 2013 Car of the Year, received Consumer Reports’ Best Overall Car and earned the highest-ever safety rating awarded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2017, Tesla began deliveries of Model 3, a $35,000 mass-market electric car with over 215 miles of range, and unveiled Tesla Semi, which is designed to save owners at least $200,000 over a million miles based on fuel costs alone.

In 2015, Tesla introduced two energy storage products, the Powerwall home battery and the Powerpack industrial-scale battery. In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, the leading provider of solar power systems in the United States, and in 2017 released Solar Roof, a beautiful and affordable energy generation product. If you want to read more about Tesla, here you go:

Elon Musk is also CEO of Neuralink, which is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers, and co-founder and chairman of OpenAI, a non-profit research company working to build safe artificial intelligence and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.

However, I heard today that Elon stepped down from his chairman position so there will not be a conflict of interest between Tesla and OpenAI. His long term position at Tesla is to produce self driving cars. He will continue to provide funding for OpenAI.Elon also founded and serves as CEO of The Boring Company, which aims to increase tunneling speed and drop costs in order to build a large network of tunnels, solving the problem of “soul-destroying traffic”. And, this is one of my favorites as they have already started some of the projects:

I don't pay much attention to space "shots" or the "blue sky" dreams of exploring the cosmos for mining minerals. The same "blue sky" dreamers are claiming Computers will soon be functioning via use of Artificial Intelligence software applications and/or Operating Systems.

And especially anyone silly enough to think they might discover an intelligent life form out there somewhere in our galaxy.

And I'm not saying that there isn't an intelligent life form out there somewhere, I'm only saying that our current species of humans are not going to contact it.

SophieMarie, there are a dozen or so archeological sites on present day earth that are constructed out of stone or remnants of stone construction that we, present day humans, ....... don't have a clue who actually built/constructed them, ..... how old they actually are (thousands to ten-of-thousands of years BP) ..... or the tools and knowledge that was prerequisite for the building/constructing of said "historical" sites.

The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Sphynx in Egypt, ..... Mauchu Picchu in Peru, ...... the stone ruins of Puma Punku in Bolivia ....... and the stone ruins at Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey are just a few of the "un-explainables".

If we are clueless about our "past" ..... it is highly unlikely we will have success at predicting out future.

Oh No Cogar,, its back on the 2nd or third page !! www.antiquers.com !! Its the one I joined for a short while while things were slow here !! Sure did not stay long either !! That should tell you what the forum was like !!

Mart, I checked all 4 pages of posts and couldn't find that url "link" except in Reply #54 that you just posted.

TOTALLY off thread but someone got banned on other forum and NO ONE will tell me what happened! I don't know why but every time there is drama like this i am MIA, it's a CONSPIRACY! i say! Any one here know what happened on other forum?

I stopped posting there because of rudeness from a couple of regulars (NOT King of Things, who seems like a jovial sort). One of them seems to have stopped posting. Anyway, the vast majority are good folks, but you know what they say about a couple of bad apples.